Grizzlies, Big Country Share Growing Pains In Nba

Make no mistake, in case you were wondering. He is still Big Country, although now he sports a small mustache to complement his familiar flattop.

It doesn't matter that he now labors in another country, toiling as he does as the second-year and still-struggling center of the second-year and still-struggling Grizzlies. Bryant Reeves, all 7-feet, 275 pounds of him, is still living proof you can take the boy out of Gans, but you can't take Gans out of the boy.

Gans is the Oklahoma town, you might recall, that served as the launching pad for his improbable tale. From this tiny town with no stoplights, 251 residents, 34 cats and 42 dogs he moved on to Oklahoma State. There he transformed himself from a charming curiosity piece as a freshman to a Final Four folk hero as a senior. Then he traipsed even farther on, all the way up there to the Great Northwest.

He arrived as the Grizzlies' top pick in the 1995 NBA draft, but that hardly transformed him into Big Cosmopolitan. He, in fact, spent last summer in Gans rather than training and working out in Vancouver--or any city where he could mold his skills while matched against challenging foes.

So, yes, he is still Big Country no matter in which country he finds himself.

Surely, this is appropriate because he is the perfect symbol for this team for he, like it, has a bit of talent. And he, like it, is laboring to refine that talent. And he, like it, is doomed to long-and-endless nights until that talent reaches some kind of fruition.

There is no hiding any of these facts, just as Reeves cannot hide that he is Country.

"We're not anywhere near being a decent team yet," coach Brian Winters bluntly observes, "and that makes it hard on everybody."

Guard Lee Mayberry admits it's tough.

"Everyone gets tired of losing," he says. "But you just have to be happy to be here. We're blessed to be playing at this level. We could be out doing 9-to-5."

Reeves agrees.

"What we went through last year made for a very long year," he says. "We were 15-67. I don't think I lost 67 games since I started playing. But we know we're going to have growing pains. But as long as you see some improvement, you can keep going."

That is all the Grizzlies are left with even now, just three games into this season. None of them harbors any illusions. All of them are stark realists.

None of them talks of pulling off some big upsets. All are just happy to be here. None even dreams of sneaking into the playoffs. None pretends to play for a contender. All of them just hope, as Mayberry says, "To keep building. We won 15 last year. We just have to build on that."

That, of course, is like building up from a curbstone and leaves Winters, with victories so scarce, recognizing improvement invisible to anyone but the beholder. That 23-point whipping the Bulls laid on them Tuesday? Not even worth discussing because his team entered the Election Day game with less hope than Bob Dole.

So Winters was left to talk instead of small things, minute things really. Of this player reacting well on defense. Of that player jumping out on a screen. Of a third player seeing the ball when he was off it and of all his players running their offense as if they knew it.

"All those kinds of things," he says, which are the only things that can provide this woebegone team with any kind of solace.

How long will this go on?

"I don't know how long," Winters says. "But as long as I see the guys playing hard and I see them growing as a team, well. . . . There's a lot of things I can't control. You would like to control everything. You would like to have five All-Stars out there playing. Then it would be easy, you would win a lot of games. But that's not going to happen here.

"I have a 19-year-old forward (Shareef Abdur-Rahim). I have another rookie forward I want to play (Roy Rogers). I have Country, who's still learning.

"You have to remember. This is a whole new world for them."

Or, in other terms, expansion still means expansion just as surely as Country means country.